A recent
announcement
on the federal PACER website indicated that PACER documents from five
courts prior to certain dates (pre-2010 for two courts, pre-2012 for one
court, etc.) would no longer be available on PACER. The announcement was
reported widely by news organizations, including the Washington
Post and
Ars
Technica.
The announcement has now been changed to explain, “As a result of these
architectural changes, the locally developed legacy case management
systems in the five courts listed below are now incompatible with PACER;
therefore, the judiciary is no longer able to provide electronic access
to the closed cases on those systems.” See a screenshot of the earlier
announcement without this explanation:

Original PACER announcement

This morning, Free Law Project signed on to five
letters from the non-profit,
Public.Resource.Org, headed by Carl
Malamud, asking the Chief Judge of
each of these five courts to provide us with access to these newly
offline documents. The letter proposes that we be provided access in
order to conduct privacy research, particularly with respect to the
presence of social security numbers in court records, as
Public.Resource.Org has done previously in several contexts. In addition
we offer to host all the documents in a free public archive, at the
Internet Archive, as we do now
with RECAP documents. Free Law Project would
also plan, ultimately, to incorporate the documents into our
CourtListener platform, for even easier
full-text searching and public accessibility.

The National Law
Journal
collected various tweets from lawyers and academics upset over the PACER
announcement, and the general reaction to the surprise decision has been
dismay, as many of these practitioners and professors rely on these
documents for their work. We hope the Chief Judges we have reached out
to today will agree to our request and allow us to get these documents
back online for the public as soon as possible.